Elemental forces

Len Tabner Messum’s, 8 Cork Street, London W1, until 1 December

For those of us who live in the British Isles there are two unassailable facts. We are island dwellers who live surrounded by turbulent seas. Our emotional lives, in other words how we experience our existence and express ourselves, often have recourse to rich literary and visual traditions centred on two subjects: the land and the sea. The progenitors of a visual sensibility were Constable and Turner. Both artists pushed the boundaries in terms of how art materials could be handled, and how subject matter, such as farmland, mountains, beaches and the sea, and the intrinsic four elements (air, light, water and earth), could be interpreted as an expression of sentiment and awe. How we could experience these subjects today lies at the very heart of Len Tabner’s paintings, and it is not surprising that cultural commentators have compared his art to both Constable and Turner.

Tabner, now in his 60th year, was born and bred in the north-east, where his father was a fisherman and seaman with an intimate knowledge of the River Tees and surrounding coastline. In his boyhood, Tabner would accompany his father, sketchbook in hand, and these memories formed his own emotional landscape. After studying at Reading University, he returned to North Yorkshire and set up home in a remote windswept dwelling at High Boulby just outside Whitby, recorded as having the highest cliff top in Britain. His method of working involves literally driving his Land Rover down to the sea and weighting his easel against the elements, while his travels abroad have found him on the vast wave-swept decks of aircraft carriers in the North Atlantic. These remarkable engagements with the sea dominate the current exhibition, which features 60 small- to large-scale works, from 1991 to the present, including two of Tabner’s ‘eight-footers’: ‘And Darkness lay upon the Face of the Waters’ and ‘The Glory of the Morning’.